Simplify your digitization programs with insights and practices from this ancient art of paper folding.

When it comes to digital transformation, organizations need to prepare for a long journey. According to our new study conducted with 451 Research, Asia Pacific companies see digital transformation programs as long-term strategic initiatives that receive top-level executive backing. Forty-five percent of companies expect them to run for three to five years.

The journey is a step-by-step process that has multiple moving parts. To ensure complete digital transformation, enterprises need to think about the whole stack—from network to infrastructure and workloads. The entire process might be long, but with the right framework, you can simplify your program.

One of the best ways to understand and think about the journey is to compare it to origami. From this ancient art of paper folding, we can draw many useful insights that can help you visualize and streamline your digital transformations.

Be as agile as paper

One of the most fascinating facts about origami is that complex shapes can be folded out of a single sheet of art paper. Such extreme agility is crucial if you want to succeed in business today. Over one-third of companies in Asia Pacific say their industry has been disrupted by digital technologies in the past three years. Your digital transformation should incorporate new technologies—such as convenient mobile apps, buyer insights from customer data, and automation to accelerate operations. This way, you stand a better chance of being the disrupter, instead of the disrupted.

Ensure efficiency with the right steps

There are many instructional guides for origami today—both online and offline. These instructions have been tried, tested, and improved over the years by a long line of artists, ensuring that practitioners today can fold their creations in the quickest way possible without compromising quality. The same principle can be applied to digital transformation. You need an operational roadmap that manages your heterogeneous environments and IT workloads effectively. This will help keep your systems running round the clock and empower your workforce to serve customers better.

Overcome risks with planning and safeguards

Before an origami artist folds a piece, he or she makes the necessary preparations to minimize the risk of errors during the process. This entails finding the right types and colors of paper and sequence of steps. For very complex designs, the artist might even create “crease patterns” to lay out the basic structure of the model. Managing risks is important as well for digital transformation. In this context, it means ensuring that you are adequately equipped to deal with today’s threats and data breaches. Securing against everything is impossible, so adopt a risk management approach that allows you to spend smarter—not just more—on cybersecurity.

Differentiate yourself for your customers

The sky’s the limit when it comes to creating origami figures. With sufficient talent and practice, an origami artist can create unique designs never seen before. Similarly, digital transformation done right will give you the power to stand out in a crowded market. You can create the right environments for testing and innovation and convert customer data into actionable intelligence. In this manner, you will be able to build more customer-centric services your audiences will remember you for.

Keep these four insights from origami in mind when you think about digital transformation. To accelerate and secure your journey, you can partner with an IT services provider that can offer a systematic approach much like the paper folding art. You can also download our report for more insights and best practices related to digital transformation in the region.